The Microsoft Excel World Championship is a thing

Most of us are never going to make it to the Olympics. But for fast typers who know how to work a spreadsheet, there’s a whole other kind of world championship up for grabs.

For 16 years, tech-savvy teens have convened at the Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship, an annual cutthroat competition that gathers the best and brightest Microsoft Office whiz kids from around the globe.At this year’s competition, the first-place trophy in Microsoft Excel went to an American for the first time: John Dumoulin, a 17-year-old rising senior from Woodbridge, Virginia.

I think I finally found it. Here it is. The whitest event in the world. I’ve never been, and I’ll never go, but I can already picture the event perfectly. I’m just visioning a sea of khakis and lanyards.

Here’s the kid who won it:

I hate this kid. Nerd. Congrats man, all that work will pay off when you get to write “proficient in excel” on your resume, just like every other person in the world. Imagine interviewing this kid? “So what are your interests outside of work?” “Spreadsheets.” Like oh cool we have an American Psycho situation on our hands. This sounds like a guy I want to spend eight hours a day with. There’s no doubt in my mind that this kid will eventually lose it. Anytime I spend over an hour working in Excel, I’m a bad decision away from being on the front page of CNN, so I could only imagine the damage that’s been done to him.

You know what’s cooler than being an expert in Microsoft Excel? Being a normal person and just Googling the formulas that you don’t know.

I wonder what this kid’s bedroom looks like. Most high school kids have posters of pro athletes and bands, this kid probably has a PWC flag above his bed. I wouldn’t put it past him to play fantasy accounting. He stays up all night playing World of Working Capital. I have a feeling he has a stash of sticky Wall Street Journals hidden under his bed.

His friend group doesn’t sound much better:

Dumoulin moved on to the national championship in Orlando. His friends took notice and started asking whether he could teach them how to use Excel.“My friends in my class, a few of them knew,” Dumoulin said. “But they didn’t think it was really a big thing … When I told them what it was and what skills you need to know to do it, they thought it was a pretty big deal.”

Classic high school stuff, going over your friends house and having him teach you excel. If you didn’t learn a basic computer tool with your friends, you did high school wrong. Sounds like a real wild friend group. The real life version of Superbad if you ask me. Do drugs like a normal high school kid. I would much rather have my kid steal my liquor and fill it halfway back up with water than spend his nights crushing spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets are only cool if you’re getting paid a lot to make them. If you willingly do them for the sake of doing them, that’s some next level school shooter shit. It’s all fun and games until he turns his hit list into a pivot table.